NSLog();

Why, why, why won't Mac OS X let you choose which base station you connect to? The signal strength to my "Upstairs" base station is much stronger than to my "Basement" one, yet my Mac Pro (second floor) insists on connecting to the one with the weaker signal.

At times, my "Transmit Rate" will drop to 8 or even 1 in the AirPort menu.

Things have finally been pretty stable since the problems I had months ago - I'm not even going to link to all of those posts - but this one is a continual issue. Yes, it makes sense when you have a laptop and you move around, but why won't the Mac Pro either let me choose the base station to connect to or choose the one with the consistently stronger signal?

My other laptops will choose it from time to time (when I wake them from sleep while upstairs, most often - sometimes a few feet from the Mac Pro) and only seem to choose "Basement" when they're physically closer to the basement AirPort.

P.S. For the purposes of this poll, "block popup windows" does not count as "advertising." If you block popups, you can still choose "No" in the poll.

Driver: D
Irons: B
Putting: B

More tk.

Michael J. Fox was on The Good Wife and a local Pittsburgh news channel (KDKA, obviously) did a story on what it was like to film it with Parkinson's.

One too many "r"s, folks.

I don't know why, but the fireworks that come out of people's chests are both frightening and fascinating. I swear I've seen them somewhere before - I want to say on my Mac or something, almost like the old iMovie effects - but I can't quite place them… ((Most likely because they're original to this video.))

And if you want to look at something else in this video, the lip synching is terrible.

The lack of the side scrolling button. I used it for page up/page down universally and the two arrow keys above and below it were used for various things: back/forward in Safari, delete and go to next/previous unread in Entourage and Cyndicate, etc.

The number of buttons I've got has been reduced by two, and I don't like it. There's no easy way to replace page up/down and scrolling may take a lot of getting used to.

Please don't assume from my previous post that everything with Mail was poor.

In fact, I like a few things about Mail. I like that keyboard shortcuts like option-delete will delete whole words. I like that emacs key bindings work. I like the extensibility (specifically Herald), and I like that the dock icon works, SpamSieve is integrated nicely, and so on.

Plus, Cyndicate is based on Mail, so reminding myself of some of the keyboard shortcuts is not as hard as I would have thought.

Update (2010-11-16): I like that I can paste screenshots from the clipboard (or any image for that matter). I like the way files are handled - I can drag from an email to an FTP client directly.

A little over a year ago I briefly wrote about a bug with Spaces. Essentially, if I switch spaces (either directly to a space with the number keys or by using the arrow keys to slide to the next or previous space), the keyboard shows a high likelihood of dying.

When my mouse finally died yesterday, I disabled USB Overdrive and found that the Spaces bug no longer exhibited itself. Unfortunately, USB Overdrive has not been updated since September 29 of 2009.

Given that, I'm torn. USB Overdrive has worked REALLY well, but it's been so nice not to have to avoid switching Spaces the most convenient way that I'm tempted to give Logitech Control Center a shot. I've avoided it in the past because I seem to recall good things (and USB Overdrive worked really well), but now…

P.S. Uhhhh… maybe I'll avoid LCC after all. I wonder if the USB Overdrive guy is still around. I'll have to email him.

P.P.S. I think I may have missed the "any keyboard" option in USB Overdrive. I disabled it while keeping USB Overdrive enabled and I believe Spaces continues to work. Pfffft. So dumb of me. That doesn't fix it either.

Holy bejeezus this conversion to Mail is painful. In no particular order, some thoughts.

• I miss categories and their coloring already. I have to constantly confirm what mailbox I'm in by looking to the left.
• It's weird that Mail has to "load" messages when I click to another mailbox. I can see the list being built.
• Mail lacks keyboard shortcuts for things like "next unread message" (and the one I used a lot: "delete and open next unread message"). I'll have to investigate making AppleScripts for these types of things.
• Speaking of AppleScripts, I spent nearly three hours trying to re-create a set of AppleScripts I used all the time in Entourage. They simply changed the account from which I was sending an email. Yeah, I could have just chosen it from the pop up menu, but I prefer binding specific accounts to specific keyboard shortcuts.

More tk…

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 403); »

For a long, long time I've used Microsoft's email client. Why? I was content with it, as it most functioned like Claris Emailer. It had great keyboard shortcuts (or where not great, familiar), it had wonderful AppleScript support (as I've come to find out, better than Mail), and it had categories which I used primarily to help set label colors for email, folders, contacts, etc.

It was at least Mail's equal in terms of rules, had the List manager, and with SpamSieve was as good or better at handling junk mail.

Now Microsoft has seen fit to kill Entourage and replace it with Outlook… but only to bundle Outlook with the full versions (i.e. not the student/teacher edition). As I almost never need Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (that's why we have Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, right?) I find myself with a choice to make.

So I've gone bold and have set up Mail. It'll take me a few hours just to get my mail imported, and tomorrow I'll begin the tedious re-training process necessary to teach myself how to use an app that's unlike the email app I've used for better part of the last two decades.

Seriously, what the heck does that say?

Fortunately, subsequent ones were somewhat readable. I only had to enter two more after "hernusenurc" or whatever that one is to get it right.

They can't seriously expect me to spend four minutes looking at that thing in detail, can they?

P.S. Google Apps threw this at one of the accounts I was setting up for some users.

I echo a lot of the sentiments shared in this post. The Kindle is far and away a better "reading" machine than the iPad.

Still, for the things I blow through quickly - magazines - I'd love to get an iPad. I've said it since the iPad was announced. Disappointingly, there's been no movement on this front. There's no "magazine" application or an Apple-run "Magazine Stand" application that collects and gathers magazines in a format suitable for the iPad.

I don't need interactive stuff (clicking links is about all I require) like embedded movies or moving advertisements or surveys you can take "inside" the magazine. Heck, convert a magazine to a long PDF document and deliver it to my iPad and I'd be happy. The environmentalists would be happy. The circulation department (and thus the ad department) would be happy. No?

I have the feeling I won't be getting an iPad for a long, loooong time… 😛

Does anyone know of a way to find for Rosetta software that's still on your system so that you can remove it?

I've never installed Rosetta. I delete software that asks me to install Rosetta (or, where possible, download an updated version).

Did you install it? I had no real reason not to - it felt "cleaner" not to install it and have it running - but I'm probably virtually alone in doing so.

There are two kinds of computer users out there: those who know what "/me" means and those who do not.

I like that one more than "those who have lost data and those who will." And it's true, too.

Everyone's got some "favorite independently developed Mac software." For example, I like MarsEdit and FastScripts, and Daniel's made great strides in improving the look and feel of his site. It's functional and suits the software he's developed.

But it's probably not among anyone's lists of favorite software sites ((Frankly, I'm only listing it because I like it, and I hope Daniel knows this isn't a "bash" at all.)). Maybe a site like CSSEdit's, or Transmit's is in your list.

Why, you ask? Because I'm about to create a site for Analyzr, a product which I assure you competes with nothing on the Mac market to date - not even close. Part of that process is seeing what people like, throwing it all in a blender, and coming up with something that - hopefully - combines and tweaks the best of what's out there to suit this particular product (a $50 Home and $500 Pro app).

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 283); »